ANOTHER VIEW

Published: July 15, 2003 8:00 PM

The White House concurs that a statement about Saddam Hussein trying to buy uranium for possible use in building nuclear weapons should never have made it into a State of the Union speech, but observes, too, that the statement was correct.

It was. In the sentence that has become a major political controversy, President Bush said the British government had found that Saddam had "recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." Not only did the British make such a statement, but, as national security adviser Condoleezza Rice said on national television, "The British stand by their statement."

So why hasn't British intelligence provided further evidence? There are many reasons that a spy agency may not want to divulge how it knows what it knows. A London Daily Telegraph story says one could be that the British received the evidence from French intelligence and that, under the "rules" of international intelligence-sharing, cannot produce the evidence unless the French agree.

The writer of the Telegraph story goes on to point out that the country where Saddam supposedly tried to buy the uranium, Niger, "is a former French colony, and its uranium mines are run by a French company that comes under the control of the French Atomic Energy Commission."

There's a larger context here, namely that Saddam had a history of trying to develop nuclear weapons. As think-tank expert and columnist Clifford May has written, he never gave credible reasons to think he had dropped those weapons plans.

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It is now known that the CIA had come to have doubts about any attempt by Saddam to purchase uranium in Africa, and that was reason enough for the sentence never to have made it into Bush's speech. CIA Director George Tenet reportedly had a more specific claim of the same sort excised from a Bush speech last year, and has said he should have made sure the sentence in question was not included in the State of the Union speech.

Something went awry, and it is legitimate for political opponents to voice loud suspicions about why. Thus does an open democratic system force those in power to explain themselves.

But it is not merely technical for White House spokespersons to say the president was accurate in what he said, and it is not beyond honest imagining to think that the British will be shown in the end to have been right.